There’s a thread I’ve just seen about someone’s view of atonal music. I don’t link it.
My reaction when I don’t like something is usually to ask myself a few questions, like ‘am I misunderstanding this?’ or ‘is it that my expectations for this music are wrong?’ or ‘what is the intention of this music? do I know the meaning of the sounds here, the way harmonies in tonal music are organised into hierarchies?
The audience is being asked to do more work for new music than in eg Mozart’s time. That is definitely a problem for composers.
But I try to avoid judging it against tonality, which I think is the danger here: to say ‘this music doesn’t act like tonal music, so therefore it is a failure’. If it were trying to be tonal, then it’s failing, but it’s definitely not trying to do that.
New music, breaking new ground, has historically been ill-received at first, sometimes for a long time. Berlioz, Mahler, even Beethoven’s late works. People can adjust.
